Bag The Hun AAR: Bob's Your Heinkel

Played my first non-solo of Bag the Hun last night and I have to day it was an absolute blast. We played the Bob's Your Heinkel scenario from the Too Fat Lardies Summer 2006 Special with one minor modification, we reduced the German Schwarms to 3 planes to give the Brits a fighting chance. Toby played the Luftwaffe while Brendan and I took turns playing the RAF.

The objective of the scenario for the Axis is to get the Heinkel off the south edge of the map while the Allies have to stop it from doing so.

Remember to click on the images for a bigger version.

Laid out on the table it all looks something like this:

It went slow at first as we spent a lot of time flipping back and forth through the rules. Pretty soon though things started to move along nicely and we got into some action. We learned pretty quickly that taking shots at long range only lead to wastng ammo. You really had the wait until you saw the whites of their eyes before firing.

Not too long into the game the Heinkel (played by a stand in He111) was getting dastardly close to the edge of the map. Something had to be done and so Red one piloted by Alan (Al) Deere broke formation and started chasing it down. One of the great things about playing historical games is that you learn things about the period, such as the fact the Alan Deere once survived a mid air crash with a German fighter (one of many such incidents throughout his long career).

Al Deere fired and hit the Heikel yet the biplane kept edging it's way off the map.

With only two seconds of ammo left things started to look desperate. Another hit and the pilot almost blacked out... but kept flying.

Out of ammo and on his own there was only one way that Al Deere could stop that Heinkel from leaving the map: colliding with it. Since we weren't using hexes and we couldn't have two planes in the same hex we used the ruling that if you were in base to base contact and on the same altitude band and moved through the base in which you are in contact with then the collision rule came into play. This was a desperate attempt at best but after executing a loop to slow down and then manevouring into position things started to fall into place. All we needed was for the 109's cards, move and then shoot in that order, not to come up before the Bombers Move card. Luck was on the Allies side that day as a few cards later the Heinkel had to move, now for a collision to occur all the conditions above had to be met and double six rolled on two dice. I mean you couldn't attempt something like is and actually expect it to work... right?

Well have a look at this.

Al's planes broke up with critical structural damage while the Heinkel lost it's pilot.

Just another day in the life of a Spitfire pilot.